Getting the knack of Narayam

Narayam provides input methods to several languages of India. This is seen with keen interest by many Wikimedia communities. Their need for an input method is no less profound then for their language.

At the India hackathon people expressed interest to create an input method for Marathi or Panjabi. At the WikiConference India there was interest to create an input method for the Angika language.

When technical people and language people get together, they can do awesome stuff. The language people know what it should look like while the technical people can make it happen. Doing this in an organised way however is the difference between a hack and a solution.

To create solutions we have our language support teams; once hacks are tried and tested, when it meets with all the initial requirements hacks can become a solution when they are passed on to downstream applications. When a Marathi keyboard method has been defined, why not have it also in a Linux distribution or defined in the applicable ISO standard.

Yes, it is great to start with hacks but our languages are not only used in MediaWiki for Wikipedia.
Thanks,
      GerardM